Don't be stupid, support the fairness doctrine 2

Weirdest thing: The Brawler was futzing with a recently purchased R2 unit in his basement when he found a foreign object jammed inside. He yanked on it, and, voila! (I'm not going to make the joke), there appeared a hologram of this sketchy-looking dude (middle guy in last picture, the Brawler assumes). "An urgent note for the Brew City Brawler," he said. And while the recording was corrupted by the passage of time, the Brawler could make out these words:

We are, I am sorry to say, rather consumed by many personal demands this week. Do you have time to take on this post from Patrick McIlheran in which he manages to flagrantly misrepresent federal law regarding the public airwaves, the Fairness Doctrine, the markets driving newspaper sales, and the First Amendment to the Constitution all in one fell swoop?

The recording was old. Nevertheless, the Brawler thinks it's still worth responding as he is a fan of resurrecting the Fairness Doctrine, or something much like it.

Why do we need a fairness doctrine that mandates TV and radio stations ensure different sides of an issue can make their case? Simple.

Radio communication is not merely a business for private gain, for advertising or for entertainment. It is a public concern impressed with the public trust.

Those last two sentences are of course from Herbert Hoover, who, in the last history book the Brawler read was not a "lefty."  Hoover failed to recognize the shortcomings of classical laissez faire economics at the onset of the Great Depression,  but he was accurate in recognizing that this newfangled thing called radio was something more than a business responsible only to its shareholders or the bottom line. The medium was responsible to the public. (And since the principles are the same, he would have said he same about broadcast television.)

Because the airwaves are, of course, a limited resource, an invisible natural resource. To run a radio station, or a broadcast TV station, you need an exclusive, federally granted license. (As of April, Journal Communications reported the asset value of its various broadcast licenses as more than $223 million, according to its last quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.)

With such great power comes great responsibility. That's why from Hoover's time on down, the feds created a framework that called for different sides of an issue to be presented. Critics -- usually on the right or media owners -- said it violated the First Amendment. But the Supreme Court upheld that regulatory regime.

Here's what the Supreme Court had to say in 1969 when it upheld the constitutionality of the Fairness Doctrine:

"A license permits broadcasting, but the licensee has no constitutional right to be the one who holds the license or to monopolize a... frequency to the exclusion of his fellow citizens. There is nothing in the First Amendment which prevents the Government from requiring a licensee to share his frequency with others.... It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount."

In other words, decades of law, tradition and precedent -- stuff that you think conservatives would, you know, want to conserve (except when they don't) -- endorsed the fairness doctrine. And then along came Reagan. His ideologically motivated FCC essentially scrapped the doctrine. Congress moved to codify the fairness doctrine but failed to override Reagan's veto. And so Reagan's FCC begat Rush Limbaugh in the late 1980s.

The Reaganauts claimed deregulation would serve the public interest. Twenty years on, here's instead what we have:

Juxtapose that billboard of a GOP elephant smashing a Democratic donkey (facing westbound 94 in some godawful stretch of Waukesha County not long before the 2006 election, ironically enough) with Hoover's words:

Radio communication is not merely a business for private gain, for advertising or for entertainment. It is a public concern impressed with the public trust.

The reason we need a fairness doctrine is because Journal Communications, Clear Channel et al have demonstrated beyond doubt that they cannot be trusted to uphold the public trust.  Clear Channel staging rallies against the Dixie Chicks (and by extension rallies against opponents of the Iraq War and George Bush). WTMJ running round the clock attacks on Doyle and other Dems. WISN doing the same and then having the temerity to celebrate it with a fascist (the Brawler uses the term advisedly) billboard.

To which the right, of course, cries "Unfair! This is an attack on right wing talk radio."

The McIlheran piece cited by Pundit Nation, the Nick and Nora Charles of the Wisconsin blogosphere (or so the Brawler likes to think, having never met them), is a perfect example of this genre.

So let's go to Paddy Mack:

Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican, has the guts to stand up to something so disarmingly called the "Fairness Doctrine," the point of which is to pretty much torpedo conservative talk radio.

This is the rule that used to prevail before the mid-1980s that said any broadcast opinion had to be matched by free airtime for opposing views. Remember how TV used to run "editorials" of virtually no discernable viewpoint, how AM radio subsisted on the Carpenters? Yeah, that's what the left wants again.

Actually no, that's not what the left wants. The left is not mandating content. A radio station can run Rush Limbaugh if it wants. But if it's going to run the rantings of that big, fat idiot, it needs to run countering views. If it can't figure out how to do that in a way that makes money, why is that the "left's" fault? Why does free-marketeer McIlheran have such little faith in station managers and the genius of the market?

Back to Mack:

That's because, as Sean Hackbarth points out, leftists are such losers at doing talk radio. They're hoping to blow up the one sandbox they don't control by demanding that radio stations give away hours of time -- that would be giving away their one product -- to balance off the hosts, such as Sykes, Belling or Limbaugh, that people actually want to listen to. It would be like ordering the New York Times to buy its subscribers a copy of the Weekly Standard.

First off, Paddy: the radio stations would not "be giving away [their] product." They don't own the airwaves. The public does. Radio and TV stations are not businesses like any other. They have special privileges and power. And with that comes responsibility. Or at least it should.

And the "Leftists" control the print media? Television? Ah, yes. The Brawler recalls how the New York Times and Washington Post pointed out how Whitewater was a rightwing con-job during the Clinton administration; how the media vigorously questioned Bush in the runup to the war; how The Journal Sentinel gave Doyle a pass in the last gubernatorial election and never took an opportunity to take a cheap shot on the flimsiest of pretexts. The Brawler also recalls how the Journal bravely questioned St. Steven Biskupic's prosecution of Georgia Thompson.

Thank God Charlie Sykes was there to present an honest and informed dissent.

Back to Mack, who, by any definition, is a "loser" at writing columns:

They don't propose any Fairness Doctrine for newspaper editorial pages, Hackbarth notes. There certainly isn't one mandated in law, nor ever has been.

When the feds start issuing licenses for newspapers, we can talk about this. Otherwise this is off-point whining.

Again:

Radio communication is not merely a business for private gain, for advertising or for entertainment. It is a public concern impressed with the public trust.

In the 20 years since the fairness doctrine was scrapped we've seen AM radio go from the land of the Carpenters (let's accept Mack's argument for now) to a 24-7 channel for the Republican party, a channel that broadcasts the worst sort of slurs against Democrats with impunity. It provides what must be billions in free advertising for Republicans (has anyone quantified this?) Given that most of the public is not Republican, this state of affairs clearly goes against the idea of broadcast stations being public concerns impressed with the public trust.

And no, "public trust" does not equal "sandbox for demagogic right wing talkers." So frankly the Brawler is unimpressed with the cries from conservatives that they would lose half their time on the radio. Why should they have that much time? They certainly don't represent half the people in the country.

Journal Communications, Clear Channel and the rest clearly have demonstrated they're incapable of upholding the public trust through self-regulation. And so we need some sort of fairness doctrine to help ensure this trust is upheld. The restoration of such a regulatory regime may create business challenges for these conglomerates but the Brawler doesn't really care. They had their chance and they blew it.

Don't be stupid: Support the fairness doctrine.

Comments

[kr]

It's not really the listeners who drive the programming decisions, it's the advertisers. For the most part they fancy themselves Republicans at best and conservatives at worst. And though they like to make buys based on what they perceive to be their market, the operational word is perceive. In a local market there will be a greater tendency to not have research that tells them what their audience likes. Air America in Madison could be a classic example of this.

Somehow people have to get to the advertisers and let them know that the programming they fund is inappropriate. Not talking boycott here but education.

[Tim]

In each conservative heart there beats a lust for a little totalitarian action. It gnaws at them they cannot control media content, thus this imagined bias of theirs.

Question: While I believe that Limbaugh spews what amounts to editorial content, others will say he's just entertainment. Does (would) the Fairness Doctrine apply to that?

[billy pilgrim]

Also, I'd like to see evidence that where supposed 'left wing' airtime is a money loser, the right wing shows are such cash generating affairs;

my understanding is that they don't make the nut either, without corporate underwriting.

[Nabisco]

I do some work with the NAB, and if we are to believe the advocates of reinstating the fairness doctrine, their desire to do so is an effort to increase the diversity of voices in the media. The inherent problem with this argument is that the original fairness doctrine only served to homogenize content, as trying to cover every perspective of an issue proved not only difficult, but highly unprofitable. The Brawler accuses those against reinstatement of having no faith in the free market, yet the entire purpose of the so-called fairness doctrine is to legislate results that the free market failed to provide in the likes of Air America and its ilk.

[I HATE LIBERALS]

WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU LIBBYS! YOU ARE COMMUNSITS IF YOU THINK THAT EVERYTHING SHOULD BE EQUAL, WHAT SELLS SELLS. MAYBE WE SHOULD GET RID OF ALL THE LEFTIST BULL ON THE ALPHABET NETWORKS

[I HATE LIBERALS]

WHAT DO YOU WANT THE WORLD TO BE FAIR, SUCK IT UP LIFE ISN'T LIKE THAT. LETS GET RID OF ALL THE ALPHABET NETWORKS, HOW ABOUT THAT LIBBYS?